What We Can Learn From Bradbury’s 70-Year Defense of Democracy

I’ve been out walking on the snowy back roads of Vermont a great deal this December, often accompanied by Ray Bradbury. The author has been on my mind of late and not for the reason that you might expect. As we celebrate the 70th anniversary of the publication of his masterpiece Fahrenheit 451, a number of commentators have remarked that the book’s attention to the perils of censorship, in the form of state-organized book burnings, is powerfully relevant to our own national experience in light of the spate of book bans in schools across America.

There is obvious truth to these observations. But narrow comparisons between Bradbury’s dystopia and our own times that center on censorship fail to capture the chilling prescience of Fahrenheit 451 and its dire warnings about other more insidious threats to our democracy.

As I reflect on a book which I have used so many times over the years in my classroom, it seems to me that it is Bradbury’s ridicule of the politics of superficiality that speaks most directly to us as we prepare to cast our ballots in 2024. In a much neglected passage, Bradbury describes several neighbors discussing a recent presidential election in the protagonist Guy Montag’s home. The guests fixate on the comparative heights of the two candidates, their sartorial choices, and how each combs their hair. There is nary a word of their policy differences.

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is not simply a perceptive jeremiad against the social and political dangers posed by technological distraction, it also gives us a path out of our self-induced idiocy.

The similarity of their gruel-like discourse to our own is revealed in our national dialogue about the presumed rematch between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump in 2024. In both television coverage and the conversations I overhear among friends and colleagues, two platitudes dominate. The first is that Biden is just too old, and the second is a wistful hope that both parties would select a different standard bearer. Neither of these remarks demand any meaningful thought from us or the ability to draw distinctions. That Biden is old is obvious to anyone who can count. And the vague longing for alternative candidates seems to me at best a stance of cowardly neutrality in polarized times or at worst a preemptive attempt to deny one’s responsibility for the policies that are enacted after the election.

In a plaintive conversation between Guy Montag and his suicidally unhappy wife Mildred, he asks her, “How long is it since you were really bothered?” We have a grim litany of concerns with which to be truly bothered beyond Biden’s age or our shallow displeasure that a perfect candidate has not appeared. Global temperatures are on the rise, threatening us with flooded cities and unreliable food supplies. Women in the United States are living with the consequences of the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Russia is waging a brutal war of expansion in Ukraine. Inflation still remains stubbornly high. On each of these issues, and countless more, there are serious and stark differences between Biden and Trump. As we head into a new year of momentous choice, we ought to remember that it is the unwillingness to be bothered that Bradbury warns is ultimately responsible for undermining democracy.

What is it that inhibits us from engaging in a more elevated and informed debate about the weighty question of who should sit in the Oval Office? Fahrenheit 451 offers us an answer, though we may be loath to concede that our own habits are making us collectively as vacuous and passive as the inhabitants of this fictional world. Mildred spends her waking hours watching drivel on the large screens or “parlor walls” of her home. By night she slides into a different form of oblivion by way of earbud-like “seashells” that soothingly drown out the necessary noise of her own mental life. How much do our own lives resemble poor Mildred’s existence? Has the incessant pinging of our cell phones and the blaring of music from above as we pump our gas denied us the necessary moments in which to contemplate our values and priorities? Have weekly marathons of binge watching Netflix decisively shifted our focus to amusing or tawdry things and away from the kind of rigorous examination of pressing matters that is demanded of citizens in a republic?

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is not simply a perceptive jeremiad against the social and political dangers posed by technological distraction, it also gives us a path out of our self-induced idiocy. Walking. Walking is for Bradbury a revolutionary act. Montag’s epiphany about the meaninglessness of his life occurs while walking in the rain, and the book concludes on a hopeful note with the guardians of our collective literary heritage on foot, following the railroad lines into a better future. Walking, preferably alone and without a phone, offers us a refuge in which to engage in honest dialogue with ourselves. The almost magical merging of motion and quietude creates the conditions for us to wrestle with our values and envision how we wish our society to be. When we return from our rambles, we can then engage in the much disparaged political act of bothering our neighbors.